Keywords

Another aspect of happiness that is commonly described as contagious is laughter, which provides another entry point to ethical issues connected to drug research. There was a lot of laughter during most of the interviews included in this study. The interviewees laughed the most, but we also laughed together. Intoxicated people do hilarious things, it is an expected consequence that is not surprising (Waldén 2010). Nevertheless, the problem of the contagiousness of happiness and laughter is a chafing factor in research on potentially dangerous behaviour. To what extent does the researcher become part of the drug use through the interview situation? What role do interviewees’ stories, including humour, play in the making of drug use?

Madelene lights up when I ask if drug use has led to any experiences that she would not otherwise have had. Her hitherto quiet and relatively brief way of answering the interview questions is replaced by a more eager, laughing way of talking. She says:

[Low-key laughter] But some of the absolute funniest experiences I’ve had, I’ve had when, when I or others have been under the influence of drugs. It would never have happened otherwise …Footnote 1

Then follows a story about a trip to Lisbon. There she used cocaine, which she explains she had already experienced as a drug that makes her paranoid, but she says that the quality was so high that she was tempted to take it anyway (cf. Ahmed 2014, p. 80: sometimes proximity to the wrong object can be perceived as the object insisting on being used, like a cake that wants to be eaten).

we lay down and took it [snorted cocaine] in my hotel room all night, instead of sleeping like the others because we had to catch a train at seven in the morning. But then we got stoned. So it ended up that a guard had to kick in the door to our hotel room. Because I had [laughter in the voice] I climbed out of the window and smoked, I used it as a door, so I didn’t even realise there was a door any more. And I’d barricaded it. [Laughs] So… it was a rude awakening.

So Madelene becomes afraid of uninvited guests and barricades the door, apparently with her friend’s approval, and then climbs out of the window to smoke instead. After being awake for a long time, they fall asleep. When checkout time had passed, the hotel staff have to break through the barricaded door to wake them up.

What is funny about this story? In and of themselves, the events—barricading a hotel room door, the psychological reactions of paranoia and sleeping so soundly that one only wakes up when a guard breaks down the door—sound rather unpleasant and perhaps tragic. But this stands in stark contrast to the way Madelene as a narrator recounts the event as one of the funniest things that has ever happened to her.

The combination of desired mental states, (mentioned only between the lines, in the judgement that the quality of the cocaine at the site was good) and undesired ones, seems to imply a contradictory experience of terrifying pleasure. This is not an unusual account. This is how many drug highs have been described throughout history: as experiences of temporary madness where intense pleasure is interspersed with intense discomfort. The poet Mary “Perdita” Robinson, who lived from 1758 to 1800, is one of the people who use drugs who has described such experiences. Another is the dancer Anita Berber (1899–1928), known among other things for her “Cocaine Dance”, which she performed in Berlin nightclubs during the 1920s, and which expressed euphoria, “freak-out” and despair, according to the authors Palmer and Horowitz (2000, pp. 95f.), whose book on historical women’s drug use also includes Berber’s eerily dark poem “Cocaine” (Snow Poem) from 1923. The previously mentioned Birgitta Stenberg is another of those who has written about personal experiences of opium, cocaine and amphetamine intoxication in this way (see, e.g., Rapport 2017/1969). The respective drugs are portrayed in these works as evil and painful and their own behaviour as madness, but at the same time, the drug is described with love. Robinson, in her 1791 poem “The Maniac” (cited in Palmer and Horowitz 2000, p. 27), describes opium as a demon with a male pronoun:

Verse

Verse O’erwhelm’d with agonizing dreams, And bound in spells of fancied Night, I start, convulsive, wild, distraught! […] The Form in silence I adore His magic smile, his murd’rous eye!

The anguished pleasure described in this more than 200-year-old poem resembles a destructive love affair. Despite anxiety and convulsions, Robinson admires the menacing demon and his “magic smile”. In this type of experience, the horror does not detract from the pleasure, but becomes part of an intense experience.

In Madelene’s story, the pleasure is implicit. Despite knowing that cocaine makes her paranoid, she cannot resist using it and, in retrospect, it is an experience that is narrated in a pleasurable and dramatic way, but also with laughter. Unlike the historical women, she perceives the drama as hilarious, including the strong emotions. What makes the drug story comical?

Madelene’s story reveals the fundamental difference between life worlds that drugs can create. Her picture of reality clashes with that of her surroundings, where people act according to set plans: the train leaves, the hotel guard breaks in when Madelene does not leave the room. She is out of tune. From her starting point, her body, the world unfolds in a way that does not match the outside world. Ahmed discusses temporal non-attunement to the environment as being, sometimes, an adaptation to otherness (2014, p. 51). Madelene was temporarily out of tune, while in the interview situation she is back in tune. But she looks back on the out-of-tune experience as a wonderful otherness. This otherness contrasts with the impression of the physical and verbal Madelene sitting opposite me during the interview, who is a calm and serious person, but who lights up at the memory of what happened then. After discussing topics including her childhood, her social life and her career, the Lisbon tale stands out from the overall picture in a way that is rendered invisible here, where the story is presented by itself. Madelene finds what happened funny. As I interview her, I laugh at the tribulations she describes.

1 Laughter in Interviews

Interview responses in general, and laughter in particular, perhaps, can be misleading. They/it can reflect uncertainty, may be intended to cover up unsettling emotions, power structures and hierarchies, or mislead one in other ways (Billig 2005). Or, as folklorist Lena Marander-Eklund asks: “Are you able to say anything about emotions when analysing laughter? Is laughter a way of revealing emotions or a way of concealing them?” (2008, p. 96). Is there an ethical problem here? Is it ok to laugh at interviewees’ stories about previous mentally unstable conditions? The question of the function of laughter comes into focus, how humour arises and why it is built into a story.

In his book Laughter and Ridicule: Towards a Social Critique of Humour (2005), sociologist and social psychologist Michael Billig posits that humour is a rhetorical question, that ridicule is essential for social interaction, and that this is universal. Laughter, in the case of ridicule, tells someone that a social convention has been violated, and it is expected that this will be met with feelings of embarrassment on the part of the offender. Examples of things that can lead to ridiculing laughter are deviant clothing, failures, falling and so on. These are deviations that need an audience in order to be funny, and they are, therefore, social phenomena (ibid., p. 121). Ridicule, Billig argues, functions as a basic type of reprimand that participates in the negotiation of social boundaries from early childhood. When adults laugh at children’s behaviour, this also means that the child learns to expose others to laughter in similar situations. The task of the environment when someone laughs is either to participate in the laughter, and thus confirm the joker’s judgement, or to refrain from laughing, to respond with “non-laughter”, which is a sign that the joke and the laughter itself violated social boundaries.

Billig refers to such moments of laughingly recalling one’s own shortcomings as “‘laugh about it later’ stories”. Typical of these stories, he writes, is that the thing that happened was not funny to the narrator in the moment; it is only once it is recounted later on, accompanied by laughter, that it becomes funny. The person who experienced the situation has then, together with those listening to the story, become an observer of what happened and can be amused at the expense of the narrator’s former self. Another typical feature of such a story, according to Billig, is that the narrator and the listeners laugh, but no one is described as having laughed in the actual situation. A story that includes the laughter of the contemporary environment is instead told to seek sympathy.

In the “laugh about it later” story, the laughter must now belong to the teller and to their hearers, not to the witnesses of the original episode. In this respect, the story can become one about how “I/we disrupted the social interaction”. […] you, the hearers, are invited to laugh at the temporary disruption of social life. The teller, far from being a humiliated victim of embarrassment, becomes the unconventional hero/heroine, who can laugh at the surprise of others. (ibid., p. 233)

Billig highlights that a narrator who recounts a potentially embarrassing past event as a funny situation usually omits any third-party laughter from their story, in order to become (together with their audience) the laughing party. According to Billig, this means that storytelling provides a dual reward, where the person telling the story assumes the status-enhancing position of the laughing person, while the potentially embarrassing event in the past instead takes the form of a rebellious act, turning the former self of the narrator into a hero who breaks social rules. What was or could have been embarrassing in the past is thus renegotiated so that the narrator benefits from the embarrassment without suffering it in the present.

In Madelene’s story, she behaves in a way that runs counter to expectations. However, the event is clearly depicted at a distance from her psychological state at the time, which makes the waywardness appear to stem from an alternative position, disconnected from her current person (cf. Lalander 2016, pp. 222f.). The story continues (with a chronological jump back in memory):

I suddenly decided that I wanted to go out and have something to eat. But, like I said, I get pretty paranoid when I, you know, take things [breathes in through her nose]. So I clambered out of the room’s window and just, “shit, the nearest place to eat.” Then I found this place that did hamburgers […] and sat down on a bee. [Laughs] And then I panicked like mad.

There is a pronounced vulnerability in this story: paranoia, shyness, physical pain and panic. Yet the sequence is part of what is presented as funny, and Madelene laughs at the memory of the bee. She is an observer who looks back with the power of laughter.

But, for this to work, the environment needs to recognise her, through laughter or some form of socially accepted compensation for laughter that lies between laughter and non-laughter. Billig states that such rewards can be acts such as groans or delayed, slow laughter (2005, p. 193). Here, a non-laugh or a laugh that “gets stuck in the throat” (cf. Jönsson and Nilsson 2014) could indicate that what happened was, for example, tragic, unethical, unsympathetic or, something I interpret as particularly relevant in relation to intoxication stories, that the distance between the narrator and their previous self is not credible and the temporality of the otherness is questioned.

I believe that the audience’s assessment will largely depend upon the impression the narrator makes and the connection between the narrator and their norm-breaking former self. For the story to be funny, the narrator has to reenact their past self in a way that shows that they were a different person back then than the storytelling self they are now. If Madelene had appeared paranoid while narrating her story, it would have given a completely different impression. Here, I perceive that there must be a relationship of incongruence (see Billig 2005, pp. 57ff.) between the narrator and the narrator’s former self, which can serve as a key to the humour that arises. But I also perceive a dimension that extends beyond what Billig describes, and that is the impression of solidarity with the former Madelene that her present self gives. There is a warmth in the way in which she looks back at her former self and embraces her. I interpret this as a bond that is usually hidden, a solidarity with another way of being.

Ethnologist Alf Arvidsson argues that the audience’s reception of stories depends upon the authority that the storyteller manages to create. He suggests that this is why stories usually begin with the narrator attempting to establish authority, as a platform for the tale that is to follow (2014, p. 31). Such authority can be based, for example, on experience. I argue that this is also relevant for stories involving humour. A narrator can claim that something is funny, but whether or not their story will actually manage to make people laugh depends on the narrator’s authority within that context (see, e.g., Billig 2005, pp. 177f.). Rhetorically, narratorial authority is tied to broader concepts such as ethos, character and the ability to understand and adjust one’s message to one’s audience (Johannesson 2013). Ethos can be criticised from a power-critical perspective as a factor that is influenced by class, gender, sexuality and so on (Ryan et al. 2016), which complicates the concept’s relationship to experience as well as to the audience. Recounted experiences construct their narrator in different ways, depending upon who is listening.

When it comes to drug use, however, experience as a creator of authority can be a Catch-22. A person cannot talk about self-perceived drug use without experience, but that very experience can discredit the narrator because drug use is linked to untrustworthiness and low status, among other things (Lalander 2016). The experienced narrator as an authority, with the right to narrate, therefore, ends up in a peculiar grey area, where the very thing that grants them authority could simultaneously invalidate what they say. The distance between the temporary high and the narrator can be blurred by notions of the knarkare. In Madelene’s story and those that follow, I perceive that the interviewees navigate performatively through the interview situation in a way that is intended to overcome this problem. Authority is built upon experience, but via a distanced narrator who marks that distance through laughter, and to this is added contributing ethos-strengthening factors, as Madelene does when her story continues.

In the midst of the scenario that Madelene paints, she describes a completely different aspect of herself than her mental vulnerability, namely her ability and interest in programming. She says that she “got into it” during her hotel stay and proudly recounts:

I just sat there and built this fucking amazing system that’s still in use, actually. One of Sweden’s biggest – one of the world’s biggest companies, actually – uses this system I built when I was out of my mind in a hotel room in, [laughs] in Lisbon. But they don’t know that.

According to this quote, the mentally unstable person was also a person with great cognitive ability with links to “one of the worlds biggest companies”. The drug story is no longer solely about vulnerability and mental queerness, and the hero of the story not only breaks societal rules but also acts as a cog in a high-tech wheel, someone who is central to the construction of the modern world. The laughter is now directed not only at Madelene’s former self, but also at the unsuspecting company that uses a product created under such peculiar, drug-induced circumstances.

The ethos is thus built up in a conventional way, by referring to professional achievements, and at the same time by distancing the former self, in the way that Billig describes, which includes humour at the expense of the former, intoxicated self. If Madelene had not laughed at her story, the distance would be unclear and it would have become difficult to make out her current relationship to social norms, which would then affect her authority as a narrator. But the distance does not prevent the boundary-crossing heroine from being linked to Madelene’s person through experience. She becomes someone who has experienced breaking social conventions and has the right to talk about it.

If I had not laughed at her story, it would have been a significant act (Billig 2005, pp. 75ff.), a non-laugh that would have signalled that her distanced approach to the previous events was not credible. Instead, I laughed (or made some kind of substitute-sound) and thereby confirmed her version of the story as boundary-pushing and heroic.

2 The Story as Part of Drug Use

Regardless of the response, the interviewer’s actions are part of a dialogue that has consequences for the continuing narrative. Several researchers, including Sebastien Tutenges and Sveinung Sandberg (2013), have described how stories about self-experienced intoxication can constitute key aspects of the intoxication experience (see also Waldén 2010). From Tutenges and Sandberg’s study of Danish young people on holiday in Bulgaria, they conclude that stories about events during intoxication are not only significant parts of the desired experiences, but also point forward, towards new intoxications that can mimic or trump the previous stories: “substance use generates stories, but stories also motivate substance use” (Tutenges and Sandberg 2013, p. 359).

Based on such an approach to the drug story, as a movement forward, orientated towards new drugs and new drug stories, the interviewer’s response becomes part of an ongoing making of drug use.

The above researchers see a pattern in the events that the interviewees believe can form the basis of a good story.

Vomiting and sleeping in inappropriate places, for example, were recurrent themes. Other typical drinking stories involved individuals who hurt themselves, passed out, wrecked hotel rooms, shocked or annoyed strangers, climbed or jumped from balconies, got into fights, stripped, had public sex or encountered exotic individuals such as drug dealers and prostitutes. (ibid., p. 540)

Madelene’s story fits well with several of these themes. She sleeps in an inappropriate place and time, injures herself, “passes out”, the hotel room is vandalised, she annoys the hotel staff and climbs out of her window. But one difference I perceive is that the events that Madelene describes are largely attributed to her own psychological and mental states and abilities. I will return below to this way of linking the funny to the psyche and inner experiences.

The accounts from Bulgaria give a picture of unrestrained and largely carefree partying, which the interviewees justify by saying that they want to have fun memories to look back on and share with friends. They also want to be able to tell their children that they have had these experiences. One of the women interviewed, Birgitte, explains: “you’ve got to get out there and try stuff before you get old and grey. We don’t want to find ourselves thinking back to an eventless life”. And another interviewee, Kathrine, says: “Also, to be able to tell your children, ‘listen, I was part of it, and I’ve tried it’. Then they will think, ‘damn, my mother was really cool when she was young’ [laughter]” (ibid., p. 542).

The theory that stories of intoxication lead people onwards thus assumes that there will be an ending, like old age or parenthood, when the momentum—intoxication, followed by stories, followed by repeated intoxication, and so on—eventually concludes with stories. Tutenges and Sandberg’s interviewees exhibit a certain reflexivity, wondering whether they could have handled their intoxication differently. This reflexivity is even more evident in my material. The forward movements in the stories consist of ongoing orientations, with the stories largely pointing out directions away from the repetition of old mistakes. Laughter, which in Tutenges and Sandberg’s interpretation is about a social reward for a successful story about intoxication and which is to be trumped next time, may in some stories rather have a function that is in line with Billig’s analysis of ridicule as a correction mechanism.

Thea talks about an experience that she had in which the comical aspect of drug use is positioned entirely as an inner experience, which is an overall characteristic of most of the drug stories in my material. The intensity of this experience was conveyed wordlessly, through peals of laughter throughout the story.

Thea::

I used a quarter of LSD I happened to have left, because I was bored. Then I went to the cinema. [Deep sigh] It… [sigh] Fuck, could have gone and watched something fluffy and nice […] anything other than the latest Mad Max. [laughs] Which is what I did. That was stupid. But, I made it.

Emma::

Why was it stupid?

Thea::

The film. It’s like, it’s a dystopia. It takes less than a minute – and then it starts, the action. They just dive right in and… keep going and just “drrr”, “pchh”, and you can’t miss these evil, evil characters in this, like, dystopian future. Skinhead types, mm, so it’s like the opposite of what you…

Emma::

Was it a poor choice of film, or…?

Thea::

Yes, it was a poor choice of film. A really, really poor choice! [chokes with laughter] I still don’t know what I was thinking. People had told me it was good but, I’d seen Mad Max films before, so… it was bad judgement on my part. I guess I was kind of bored… but it ended up being what I expected, everything with extra feelings, and I really got into the film. But I also repressed a lot of things. So when I walked out it was like, “right, open, air” and just “oh god”, and I thought “What the hell. That was stupid.” Cycled home.

Here, actually, and then things got pleasant and nice. I just kept thinking “God, what a waste, so stupid”. And then I was here and enjoyed myself with music and headphones on for the rest of the evening.

Thea explains that this is something she should have understood and avoided: that watching a future dystopian action film while on LSD is an unpleasant experience that amplifies and distorts the impressions and emotions. The fact that the film she watched is of the type that tries to maximise the contemporary possibilities of creating strong sensory impressions made her exposed and vulnerable. She was holding back overwhelming emotions and describes great relief when she finally got out and could cycle home. “I made it”, she comments.

To understand the intensity of Thea’s experience, other stories of LSD intoxication can be helpful. These typically involve experiences of nature and quiet interactions with other people. Existential experiences of becoming one with large and small animals, plants, the universe and partners are common (see, e.g., Palmer and Horowitz 2000). People under the influence of LSD experience altered and heightened sensory impressions that can be overwhelming. Research conducted using LSD always includes some form of companion who can help when experiences become so overpowering that they risk leading to terrifying states, known as “a bad trip”, which can pose health risks (Pollan 2018; Hofmann 2019). In one of her diaries, author Anaïs Nin recounts the first time she took LSD (The Diary of Anais Nin: Volume 1947–1955, 1975). It was an organised experiment. She was accompanied by her psychiatrist and it took place in his office. After taking it, she experiences some initial changes in the appearance of the room she is in, and then goes out into the back garden. With fascination, she describes the experience of a variety of sensory impressions:

The dazzle of the sun was blinding, every speck of gold multiplied and magnified. Trees, clouds, lawns heaved and undulated too, the clouds flying at tremendous speed. […] My senses were multiplied as if I had a hundred eyes, a hundred ears, a hundred fingertips. […] The music vibrated through my body as if I were one of the instruments and I felt myself becoming a full percussion orchestra, becoming green, blue, orange. (1975, p. 256)

It is difficult to imagine having a hundred eyes, a hundred ears and so on, but the description can nevertheless give an indication of how LSD intoxication intensifies one’s impressions from the environment. I interpret Thea as judging that a film about something “fuzzy and nice” might possibly have served as a companion through a pleasant experience. A violent film full of “evil” characters, loud noises and dystopian ideas, on the other hand, becomes almost unbearable for Thea to sit through with her heightened senses and experiences of dissolved boundaries between the self and the environment. Thea’s comment “I made it” signals that it was not obvious that she would do so.

Thea repeats that the cinema visit and the choice of film were mistakes, and indicates this with laughter. As a contrast, she describes another direction for a pleasant high: being alone in her home and listening to music. The laughter here has the function of placing the cinema experience in a category of mistakes that have been experienced and should not be repeated. The social dimension is vague. Did anyone even notice that something unusual was going on in Thea’s mind? That may have been the case, perhaps she looked terrified, but the social rule-breaking that Billig argues forms the basis for the humour of ridicule may have passed unobserved. From Thea’s perspective, her breach is about poor judgement in terms of film choice, which is why she laughs at herself. But if the other cinemagoers had sensed Thea’s state of mind, they would not necessarily have perceived the film choice as the socially norm-breaking component of the context. I would say that the situation points to an aspect that Billig does not address: that the social norm-breaking that is ridiculed in a “‘laugh about it later’ story” is based on the set of norms to which the narrator relates. It is in front of people who are expected to share her judgement that the choice of film was bad that Thea laughs at herself (Sandberg and Tutenges 2018). And it is also in front of them that her heroism can be appreciated. The humour is not linked to what the rest of the cinema audience is expected to think about her choice of film, or about women who experience LSD intoxication in public places in general.

Again, the role of the researcher comes into focus. In this case, I was expected to understand that the film choice was remarkable. Based on my prior knowledge of LSD, I did also perceive the situation as Thea exposing herself to an extreme psychological challenge because LSD in itself may involve mental challenges (Hofmann 2019). Thea’s experience makes the LSD uses described above, with companions in calm environments, seem insipid in comparison.

In other words, I also perceived the choice of film as a remarkable component in this context. Depending on their point of departure, the researcher thus becomes a specific kind of audience, which has an effect on the interview.

If stories about intoxication are interpreted as a forward movement towards new intoxications, it seems inevitable that the interviewer’s laughter can become part of such a movement. However, the direction that this movement takes is negotiated through laughter, rather than pointing straight towards repeated intoxication, as Thea’s story shows. In both Thea’s and Madelene’s stories, laughter occurs mainly when less attractive parts of the high are recounted, such as Madelene sitting on a bee and Thea contemplating her poor choice of film.

But if (non-)laughter constructs the narrator through social interaction, then laughter itself is not the point here after all, Billig argues: instead, the point is what the story tells us about the narrator’s ability to temporarily disrupt social norms. An instance of non-laughter on my part, during an interview with Pernilla, illustrates how non-laughter can also strengthen the story’s ability to construct one’s past self in this way.

Pernilla is telling an adventure story set during a holiday trip, and it shows how discomfort is intertwined with the qualities that make it fun for her. She begins, hesitantly in memory:

a fucking, and it was also fun because it was mainly that, but it was awful, it was terrible… I remember – it was when I was in Bali, this is many years ago – then we slept in a hotel on a beach.

In a rather long-winded way, Pernilla recounts how she travelled to Bali, where she left her companions to go diving. Together with a group of young divers, she was welcomed by the hosts of the hotel, who set out various drugs on the terrace.

Ah, there was a lot of pot [cannabis] in bamboo bongs [a kind of pipe for smoking cannabis]. And in a corner, there was a mat if you wanted to take opioids and so on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Far out.

She says that she was smoking cannabis, enjoying the company and having fun at first, but then something happened. She began to worry that the situation had been set up as a trap by the Indonesian drug police. And then she saw a person whom she felt confirmed those fears:

I start to notice how there are all these people sitting around, and just think “hang on, this is actually kind of a strange social situation”. There’s this short, thin man, who’s wearing jeans and this kind of skin-tight leather jacket, if I recall correctly, and his hair was neatly combed, and he had these big bloody sunglasses. Right in the middle of the evening, mind. He looks like, you know, the epitome of a copper in a 1970s crime series. So he becomes that for me. He becomes a civilian police officer. [laughter]

The sight of this man thus made Pernilla question the whole situation, which she imagined could have been set up as part of a drive to tackle drug tourism. She describes herself as paranoid but ambivalent about whether it was really as bad as she imagined, and says that she asked a Dutch man for his opinion. He laughed out loud at the idea and appeared completely unconcerned, giving her a sense of relief. As she recounts the incident, she sounds convinced that the man was simply right and that her fears were absurd. She says:

it’s the kind of situation that’s just ridiculously funny in hindsight, because you look at it with sober eyes and go “my god you were cuckoo”.

When I object that Indonesia, at least in recent years (the interview was conducted in 2018), is actually associated with police interventions against drug tourism,Footnote 2 unlike The Netherlands, where drug tourism is an established part of the nation’s brand, she howls with laughter and comments that it was lucky I wasn’t there. The unpleasant experience is funny when it is portrayed as completely crazy, with the image of the stereotypical 1970s cop at its centre, but it becomes funny all over again at the thought that her judgement at the time may have been reasonable and that she may have found herself in a strange situation that could have put her at risk of prosecution.

My reaction, not laughing, and the justification that risked killing the joy (cf. Ahmed 2010) in fact led to more laughter.

There is thus no choice of response on the part of the interviewer, which certainly constructs the narrator in a certain way. The interviewer’s response becomes part of a living, and never entirely predictable, event that can lead to laughter, but also to silence or on to other paths.

3 Women’s Proud Madness

I perceive that there is a self-respect in this kind of laughing story, which does not tally with Billig’s categorising into either funny stories that are told to become the laughing one who laughs, or stories that might include other laughers, told to seek sympathy in the latter audience. I perceive the differences as having to do with intoxication, but also with the making of gender. Billig’s book lacks a gender perspective and a majority of the stories quoted are about men. Criticism of the lack of a gender perspective has previously been directed at classic humour research (cf. Jönsson and Nilsson 2014), but researchers in other fields have also had reason to question analyses of what is perceived and described as funny when they have not taken gender into account.

Criminologists Polly Radcliffe and Fiona Measham (2014) criticise Tutenges and Sandberg’s study of young people partying in Bulgaria for lacking sensitivity to gender and other power differences. The events recounted by men include buying sex, groping, humiliating female sexual partners and degrading physical jokes with other men. The stories told by women include vomiting, karaoke in funny outfits and stripping at a club, but most of the space is taken up by reflections upon the men’s and the young women’s own behaviour, its significance and how it can be documented. Radcliffe and Measham write:

We would suggest that the gendered organisation of these drinking stories/practices extends beyond the stories and context of their telling. […] we suspect that the freedom that young women exercise within this reshaped post-feminist terrain may be insecure and contested. Our questions may point in part to the limitations of narrative research and in part to their wider contextualisation in fluid drinking cultures. We wonder too whether we may need to ask young women different sorts of questions in order to discover what scope they may have to do gendered drinking differently. (2014, pp. 346–347)

The stories I have quoted in this chapter do not include any sexual elements at all, but nevertheless I find Radcliffe and Measham’s instruction to be sensitive to how the gendered meaning of the narrated events extends beyond the narrative situation useful. Madelene has talked about her mental illness in the form of constant anxiety since childhood, about a high-performance working life and a period of burnout. She can be perceived as a “good girl” who played sports, achieved high grades and was headhunted for demanding jobs. Against this background, her story about the Lisbon hotel room and her entire interest in drug use appears to be a way of creating her own space, despite being placed in a demanding life situation. The story describes a person who breaks with expectations, but also does not conform to a stereotypical representation of femininity.

The classical stereotype of women who use drugs is that they are mentally unstable, “mad, sad and bad” (Measham 2002, pp. 343f.; Du Rose 2017). Can the openness to and articulation of exceptional mental states be understood as a way of addressing this stereotype? The mental state is central to Pernilla’s story, as it is to Thea’s and Madelene’s. Their attitude towards temporary mental vulnerability appears to be a significant part of their intoxication stories, including reactions of laughter when the events occurred, as in Pernilla’s case. The funny story and the sympathy-seeking story do not appear to be separate types of stories for them, and the stories construct them as a particular kind of boundary-breaking heroes whose psyches have dealt with temporary vulnerable states. Thea’s story is perhaps the clearest example in that it resembles the stories of extreme athletes or adventurers, who risk frozen fingers or other injuries but miraculously survive thanks to an extraordinary physique. The difference is that, instead of climbing a mountain or swimming through icy waters, Thea puts herself through extreme psychological stress. There was a pride in how these stories were told that includes pride in having experienced paranoia and other exceptional mental states.

I perceive this to be what makes the women’s stories unusual. The laughter is related to experiences that include unpleasant delusions that could have been described as traumatic, dangerous and serious, and therefore cannot be comical. To tell these stories, the narrator is thus required to take a risk. The women who tell them explore and renegotiate their inner lives by exposing themselves to risks and then recounting them through new risks and laughing at them with pride.

In the conclusion to their article, Tutenges and Sandberg write that they too perceived that most of the stories they were told, whether by women or men, were recounted with pride and pleasure (2013, p. 543). In the quotes, the interviewees contrast their uneventful lives with a life that can be told as a “good story”, which thus includes events that are usually perceived as negative, such as vomiting, abnormal sleep, injuries and violence (ibid., p. 540). But this does not necessarily mean that just anything can make a good story. The men are quoted when they talk about the abuse and humiliation of women, but no woman mentions herself as a victim. In my interview material, sexual abuse is also absent from the funny stories. Instead, they are mainly about experiences and thoughts induced by the drugs, the funny potential of which presupposes that there are other states and mindsets to fall back on. Bringing one’s former, psychologically deviant self back to life by recalling events and laughing about them requires a space that is not always available. In that sense, there are parallels between my research and the stories in Trond Erik Grønnestad and Filip Lalander’s study of individuals using drugs around a bench in a park in Norway (2015). Grønnestad and Lalander call some of these “decay stories”:

Within this frame, special kinds of stories are told that would appear odd in more “normal” settings. We call these types of Bench-sitter stories “decay stories” since they include central components of living on the edge, close to death and in misery. Such storytelling often contains black humour that includes topics and events otherwise regarded as taboo, such as death, serious illness and severe addiction. (ibid., p. 177)

Grønnestad and Lalander use Ervin Goffman and Mary Douglas to show how storytelling simultaneously creates a social community between survivors of extreme hardship, while also ritually recreating humiliating situations in an accepting context, thus “purifying” them. One example is a shared story, told to the other “bench-sitters” first by one of them before being continued by another, about how they started noticing vague symptoms that alerted them to the fact that something odd was happening to their bodies. They then went to the emergency ward, where they were told that they had a blood alcohol content of four and five per mil, respectively (2015, p. 178). Such a huge amount of alcohol would be lethal to most people, who have not been drinking extremely large amounts of alcohol for a long time. It almost killed the two narrators too, but they received emergency treatment and survived.

Most of the women I have interviewed are not part of social contexts in which they would approach a stigmatised place like the bench described in Grønnestad and Lalander’s study. But there is an aspect of the men’s stories described above that I perceive as having parallels to the women’s stories, but which is omitted in the concept of “decay stories”. This is about the boundary-breaking hero who is constructed through the response of the right audience. The clear sense of pride that Tutenges and Sandberg perceive in the young people’s stories, and which also appears in my material, can be analysed in the same way on the basis of Billig’s “laugh about it later” model, but with a modification in terms of the ridicule, which I perceive as partly relevant but insufficient to capture what the laughter is about. My interpretation of the purpose of this type of story, with narratives that revolve around a body that undergoes humiliating, dangerous, unpleasant or potentially fatal stresses but survives, is to look back from a distance but at the same time with a close connection to the past, and not only to be the one who laughs but also to have the space to examine that past experience while recognising it as a test of strength.

I perceive that this is about something more than cleansing oneself of dirt, which is only dirt in certain normative systems. The narrators in Grønnestad and Lalander’s study, as well as those in mine, can take on something like action hero or superhero characters, i.e. in sharp contrast to the term “decay stories”. The body undergoes dangers and discomforts but, in the end, can conclude that they “made it”, in Thea’s words. This is not to say that the structural conditions of the people studied at the bench (who are described as poor, constantly under the influence of alcohol or drugs, living in homelessness, etc.) are not blatantly defined as dirt in Mary Douglas’ sense by large segments of society (2002/1966; see also the chapter Avoiding the Knarkare). But the humorous action story of putting one’s body through excruciating stresses and surviving them also constructs a hero (cf. Billig 2005, p. 233), whose body and/or psyche has proven their strength. The narrative as a forward movement draws an alternative line (Ahmed 2006), along which the narrator describes special abilities and interests that, with the help of the audience’s response, create a boundary-breaking person who is not intended to be judged within any other normative system than the one to which the narrator relates (cf. Sandberg and Tutenges 2018).